


May, 1996

by poetsandzombies



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: College, Corny, Early Twenties, Fluff, Getting Together, Love Confessions, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:49:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26244445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poetsandzombies/pseuds/poetsandzombies
Summary: Richie comes home after a semester away at college. Eddie picks him up at the train station.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 7
Kudos: 140





	May, 1996

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote and posted this on tumblr in parts over a couple of weeks so the writing might be a little disjointed, and my tumblr drabbles tend to be lower quality than the work I upload here, but anyways! Do with that what you will. <3

**Bangor, Maine —May 1996 — 6:19 PM  
**  
When Richie Tozier steps out onto the hazardously creaky platform, into the hustle and bustle of the station from the heat of the unairconditioned train, he has two things on his mind.

The first, a mild curiosity about how best his dad might like to hear that he won’t be following in his dentistry-sized footsteps after all. It’s a long-running joke, but he thinks if he can get a laugh out of him on the way down, the car ride home won’t be so bad. 

The other is the sudden memory of his friends, who come to mind hazardously and all at once, like a dream remembered after sleep. The folded stack of letters stowed somewhere away in the duffel bag slung over his shoulder says otherwise—says he remembered all along. He’s only been gone a semester, after all, and though there were some phone calls here and there, they were often poorly timed and filled with static miscommunication, so Richie familiarized himself with the art of personalized letter-writing to make sure they all kept in touch.

It may be that Richie was only gone a couple of months, but he was also the first of his friends to leave, an ordeal for all of them, and so now their faces linger as he shuffles through the crowds of strangers, pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth and shaping out a couple of jokes over various voices— _sorry pops, guess I just couldn’t **drill** it_ and _I’d never be able to fill the cavity of your shoes anyway_ and something about _dentures_.

He’s looking for the dentist man himself, Doctor Wentworth Richard Tozier, and almost doesn’t catch sight of the boy standing a little ways out of the line of traffic, leaning faux-casually against a pole, sight set on Richie like he knew exactly where to find him.

It’s Eddie Kaspbrak, the boy with both Richie’s impassioned and unrequited love as well as _more_ than a few of the letters he sent back home. He smiles brightly when Richie meets his eyes, giving a little wave, and looks to him like the embodiment of their childhood summers together. 

It’s startling, he thinks as he realizes, how much he’s missed him.

Richie starts to go to him, but stops. Something tells him to slow down—to take in the warm, freckled face, the body soft in pink cotton and neatly rolled jeans, and understand that another version of himself might have missed this. So he lets the passers-by swarm around him and takes it in.

Eddie, on the other hand, is quick rush forward. He maneuvers easily through the crowded area and, before Richie has time to register what’s happening, is _leaping_ into his arms, wrapping his own around Richie’s neck and his legs around his waist. Richie catches him easy, despite the unpreparedness, like his body is just _meant_ to answer Eddie’s.

He smells like home, and doesn’t seem at all bothered by Richie’s train-sweat appearance, so Richie buries his face in Eddie’s neck and hugs him hard.

“You’re late,” Eddie says into his hair, and it’s the first time Richie’s heard his voice in weeks.

Here’s what the letters miss about Eddie Kaspbrak: _everything_.

Richie holds him a little tighter, all jokes suddenly lost on him, and chuckles. “I wasn’t conducting the train, Eddie,” he says weakly.

A moment passes, and then another, and eventually Eddie slides down. Richie lets go with reluctance, until he can see Eddie’s smiling face again, and then he feels better about it. He misses the weight of his body in his arms, but Eddie looks _happy_. Happy in a way Richie’s never seen before.

“Damn, Eds,” he jokes. “If I’d known you’d miss me so much, I would have never left.”

Something indiscernible flashes across Eddie’s face, but he shrugs like Richie didn’t see.

“Well,” he says, blatantly not denying it. “You’re here now.”

He is. Richie pulls out of his gaze a little, suddenly remembering who he was supposed to be meeting here.

“Where’s my dad?”

“He let me pick you up.” Eddie’s smile widens as he digs his hands into his front pockets. He fishes out a ring of keys, which he dangles in front of Richie with pride. “I got a car.”

“No shit?” Richie says, letting out a small huff of surprise. When he left, Eddie, like most of their friends, was still dependent on public transport, too busy rushing through school to be able to afford anything else and not _really_ needing to anyway.

But things are different now. Richie can tell. It’s in the way Eddie’s body moves, and the way he looks at him. Richie thinks back on the letters they exchanged over the months and tries to recall a shift. He can’t.

“Well,” Eddie admits, “I share it with Bev. We worked most of the semester for it.”

Richie pouts a little, feeling his heart stutter pitifully with a mixture of pride and fear. Eddie fixes him with another soft smile and he relaxes. He wonders if he can get away with hugging him again, but swallows it down.

“What, she didn’t want to come see me?”

He grins, but Eddie doesn’t answer right away, and Richie takes that moment to gently nudge them both out of the buzz of people trying to board the train. A faint blush has bloomed across his cheeks and Richie feels relief to see it there, to be back in this space, where his only responsibility is to get Eddie to do _that_ all summer.

“I asked to come alone,” Eddie explains, unembarrassed. “I didn’t think we’d get a lot of time to talk, you know… you and me. And there are some things I needed to say.”

“To me?” Richie asks softly. That same fear from before prickles his chest, and he sucks in a sharp breath.

But Eddie’s smiling at him, has not _stopped_ smiling this whole time, and it’s so pleading and hopeful that it somehow convinces Richie that it’s going to be okay.

“Of course, _you_.”

“Well. What is it?”

Eddie pauses, brows furrowed. “Not here,” he tells him. He takes Richie’s hand in his own, and Richie tries not to let his own blush show on his face. “The car.” 

He tugs him along, heading toward an exit staircase, shooting one final, bliss-filled look behind him as they go. 

“You missed a _lot_.”

* * *

Here’s what Richie misses.

Eddie starts at the beginning, with the comfortable sting on his cheek and the look on his face after Richie leaves. But they _all_ look like this, a mixture of surprise and complete devastation pulling their mouths in opposing directions, so he tries not to pay too much attention to it. 

It’s not until a couple weeks later, when everyone’s gotten back into the groove of a new semester, that it starts to pick at him. He’s sprawled along his bed across from where Bill sits at his desk, schoolwork abandoned, both of them reading through the letters they’d received from Richie earlier that day. It’s run-of-the-mill Richie, Eddie thinks, but at one point he writes _I think you’d like the nursing program here, Eddie. My roommate’s more accident-prone than I am._ Eddie pulls his face away from the letter suddenly, a memory coming back to him from a few days before Richie had left.

_“Come with me,” Richie’s saying over an overflowing suitcase. His elbows are propped over the lid, and he puts his chin in his hand and smiles. Eddie laughs._

He must start breathing funny, he thinks, because Bill tells him to take a walk. Get some fresh air.

So he takes the back door out and follows a worn trail into the woods. It’s a wet, somewhat chilly February afternoon, and he watches the mud collect on his sneakers as he maneuvers through the trees and thinks about how, when you’re growing up, everything seems to be constantly moving forward out of your control. But there’s a point—and Eddie thinks for him, it was sometime after graduation—that it all just stops, and waits patiently for _you_ to start pushing. And the people who are tethered to you, who you thought would never leave, find a way out.

Richie sends more letters. Beverly looks into internships in New York. Eddie starts to notice how small the one-story, two-bedroom house he shares with his mother is, how small it’s _always_ been, and how little room there is for him when he moves about.

“There’s nothing here for us,” Bev says one evening, and combs a hand through Eddie’s hair. He misses Richie an inconsolable amount when she does this. 

_I dreamed about you last night. Well, Mike was there, too._

Eddie takes off at a jog and tries to focus on the pinch in his feet as the world opens up around him. 

The days get warmer. Eddie tells his mother he is considering going out of state his senior year. She laughs. 

Opening Richie’s letters are like opening pockets of himself—recovering memories he can’t remember forgetting; he and Richie by the railroad tracks, he and Richie at the drive-in theater. Richie says that he will be home next week, and that they should celebrate not flunking another semester. _But maybe not with alcohol_ , he writes. _Don’t want a repeat of prom night._

Eddie knows he’s referring to _after_ prom, when they got home and raided Mr. Tozier’s liquor cabinet until they both wound up on the cold tiles of the basement’s bathroom floor, but Eddie instead remembers the better part of that night—Richie finding him outside the school gymnasium.

He takes off running before he’s even finished the sentence he’s reading. 

_Richie smiles when he sees him, bright-eyed and sweaty, and comes over to him with an outstretched hand._

_“Have you danced at_ all _tonight?”_

_Eddie shakes his head. “I’m kind of a toe-stepper,” he tells him, even as he takes Richie’s offered hand._

_“Well, don’t shy away from it,” Richie says, and lifts Eddie onto his own feet, wrapping an arm delicately around his waist._

Eddie pulls himself and _pulls_ himself out of the hug of tree branches as he runs, the burn in his legs growing and then lifting. His heart is in his throat. 

_They can’t hear the music from outside and so they just sway, somewhat aimlessly, back and forth, neither of them mentioning the weirdness—maybe because there is none._

_“You can’t just ditch your senior prom,” Richie murmurs, breath hot in his ear. “You don’t get a lot of excuses to dance in public after this."_

_Eddie snorts. "Don’t think I’ll need to, where I’m going."_

_"And where is that?"_

Eddie can breathe just fine like this.

_"I’m not sure,” he shrugs._

_Richie pulls away, just enough to look at Eddie. His smile is gone._

_“I would go with you, you know,” he says, serious. “I would go anywhere, for you."_

Eddie is met with the bittersweet edges of sunlight when he breaks through the clearing, and collapses back onto the earth, not far from his own house—sweat-soaked and crying—where Beverly finds him ten minutes later, the keys of their newly purchased car dangling between her fingertips. Eddie touches his cheek where Richie had pinched it almost a semester earlier and said: "Try not to miss me too bad when I’m gone, Eds." 

* * *

"Did you hear me? Richie?"

Eddie has a firm grip on the steering wheel, but passes frequent glances over at Richie as he drives, tearing his eyes from the road to do so. The car is steady all the same.

Richie frowns into the palms of his hands, wondering about a mole on his ring finger and if it'd always been there. Eddie's voice sounds far away and what he's saying, even farther. 

"Sorry. I'm sorry. What?" 

Eddie heaves that small, impatient sigh Richie has missed. Richie's missed _everything_ about Eddie, down to all the little micro-mannerisms that collect themselves into a uniquely Eddie-like shape, but he can hardly look at him now. _Bill misses you_ , he remembers Eddie writing to him. _If you can believe it,_ _I think I might miss you more._

It's easier, in the ink. It's easier to fold something up and send it far away from you and pretend it goes nowhere, gets lost. What have they been doing all year?

"I love you," Eddie says, just as they hit a particularly bumpy patch of road, and Richie presses a hand against the window, losing his breath to one of the two, maybe both. Eddie looks over at him again. "I love you, Richie. And I'm sorry, you know? That I didn't know it sooner. I'm sorry I made you wait." 

The tires rattle with loose gravel from older roads the closer to town they get, and Richie closes his eyes, still unable to look at him. 

"Pull over," he says suddenly. 

A beat of quiet. "What?" 

"Pull _over_."

Eddie makes a noise of protest. "We're ten minutes from home!" 

"Eddie, please," Richie says softly. He can feel the dull, lonely ache in his chest begin to mend itself with hope and tries to will it away as Eddie pulls over onto the grass beside the now completely empty road. _A little longer_ , he tells it, unbuckling his seatbelt. _Be alone with it, just a little longer._

Eddie unbuckles too, but by the time he's opened the door, Richie's already come around to his side. Eddie sits on the side edge of his seat and sticks his legs out, planting his feet on the ground. He looks up at Richie, squinting from the sun. 

"Hi," he says innocently. 

Richie frowns at him. "You love me?" he asks, skeptical. 

"I love you," Eddie confirms. "I love you. I—" 

Richie bends down to scoop Eddie out of his seat and into his arms like before, back at the train station, only tighter now because he _can_ , and Eddie buries his face in his neck and says it over and over. _I love you_ , and he kisses him each time, lips pressed to the curve between his neck and shoulder. _I love you, I love you, I love you._ Richie lets it in this time—lets it fill that empty pocket in his heart, and everywhere else. 

"I love you too," he whispers when he feels full, and lets Eddie loose; just enough to get his feet back on the ground. "But you already seem to know that." 

Eddie blushes, and Richie is delighted that it gives him the same pleasant buzz it always has, without that edge of pain.

"I..." he tries. His eyebrows pinch together before softening, and he gives Richie a look. "You've been asking me to run away with you since the 9th grade." 

Richie smiles, almost apologetically, as he remembers. It was a joke he wore out until it wasn't very funny at all. Or maybe it never was. "Maybe I was asking a lot of a fifteen-year-old." 

But Eddie shakes his head. "No," he tells him, reaching up to push his fingers through Richie's hair. "You just knew some things I didn't." 

Richie swallows, and Eddie stands on his tiptoes and tugs him down into a kiss, a _real_ one, deep and inexperienced and embarrassingly good. As Richie pulls him close to his chest to kiss him further, he registers the quiet _beep beep beep_ of Eddie's open car door calling them back home. 

**Author's Note:**

> this 2.5k word combo exists all because i wanted eddie to jump into richie's arms at a train station g'bless


End file.
